he was probably bored

It's party time in our school district. For the students anyways. It's that time of year for standardized assessment testing. Time for the teachers and administrators to stress out and the students to whoop it up because everything stops for assessment testing.

No homework.

No other tests.

Plenty of recess.

I'm remembering assessment test time a couple of years ago when I was a part-time special ed. teacher's aid at the elementary school. I was assigned to proctor tests for a few of the students who got special accommodations.

One kid was a 4th grade student I tutored for special ed. math. As far as I know, he didn't actually have any diagnosed learning disability. He just didn't particularly care about grades and all. But I liked him, and he had what I felt was an above average creative imagination.

So I proctored his assessment test apart from the rest of his class as he was given an accommodation for reading - meaning he had someone (me) read the test instructions to him. I could tell, as we went through the various tests, that he could read his own instructions just fine, but based on his classroom performance, he was "accommodated".

I remember we got to a writing section. The writing prompt was something like this:

"Imagine that one day you wake up and you are a kangaroo. Describe your day".

I thought, oh, this is right up his alley. He'll come up with something really good! The following is basically what he wrote. I don't remember word-for-word. It took him all of about 7 minutes.

"One day I woke up and I was a kangaroo. Then I had breakfast and watched cartoons. Then I ate lunch and played video games and jumped on the trampoline. Then I ate dinner. Then I took a bath. Then I went to bed."

I looked at what he'd written, holding back my comments (no comments for assessment testing!). Then I thought, yeah, that was just like him. He did exactly what was asked, no more. He's pure rebel.

I think he's a genius.
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